Staying Whole When Everything Wants to Split You Apart

A different way of thinking about resilience

Most people think of resilience as a kind of toughness. The ability to absorb difficulty without breaking. To keep functioning when things get hard. To bounce back. It's an appealing definition because it maps onto qualities we already admire — strength, persistence, the refusal to fall apart.

But in my experience, both as a therapist and as a person navigating difficult stretches of life, that definition can quietly work against us. Because the goal of not falling apart can become its own form of fragmentation.

Here's a different definition, one that comes out of how I think about trauma and its antidote: resilience is staying whole when conditions invite us to split apart.

What splitting apart actually looks like

Fragmentation — the splitting of experience into disconnected parts — is one of the oldest and most consistent definitions of trauma across psychological traditions. It shows up in Freud, in Jung, and in virtually every contemporary model of how overwhelming experience affects the nervous system. When something is too much to hold together, we hold it in pieces instead.

Most people associate this with acute trauma — a car accident, a loss, something that happens suddenly and shatters the ordinary continuity of experience. And that's real. But there's another kind of fragmentation that's slower, more subversive, and in some ways harder to recognize precisely because it happens gradually.

Under sustained stress, the nervous system begins to orient toward threat and survival. This isn't a dramatic shift — it's incremental. Subtle. The range of what you can hold starts to narrow. You begin discarding complexity, letting go of nuance, simplifying your inner life in ways that feel like efficiency but are actually a form of losing ground.

You might notice it as an increasing intolerance for ambiguity. A shortened fuse. A growing distance from things that used to matter. Or you might not notice it at all, because one of the features of this kind of slow fragmentation is that it hides itself. We find ways to justify small departures from our own values — the corner cut here, the thing avoided there, the substance used to maintain function or take the edge off — and the justifications feel reasonable in the moment because the nervous system that's generating them is already in survival mode.

This is what coming apart at the seams looks like for high-functioning people. Not a breakdown. A drift.

Why wholeness is the goal, not calm

The reason I use the word wholeness rather than balance or calm or wellbeing is that those words tend to point toward a desired feeling state. Wholeness points toward something structural — the relationship between the parts of your experience.

At any given moment, you are having a layered experience. There's a mental layer: thoughts, interpretations, the running commentary. There's an emotional layer: the felt quality of what's happening, which sits somewhere between mind and body. And there's a physical layer: sensations, the body's live response to whatever is occurring. These three layers are always present. The question is whether they're in contact with each other.

When they are, you have access to the full information of your own experience. You can think clearly and feel what you're feeling and notice what's happening in your body, and these things speak to each other. That's a kind of wholeness. It doesn't have to feel good — contained is sometimes the best we can honestly say — but it's real, and it's a foundation for actual movement.

When they aren't — when thought and emotion and body have drifted apart, or when one layer has gone offline to protect the others from overwhelm — you're working with incomplete information about your own situation. And decisions made from that place, however logical they appear, tend to compound the problem.

Resilience as practice, not achievement

What I've come to believe is that staying whole isn't something you either have or don't have. It's something you tend. Traditions that have thought carefully about human suffering — therapeutic, spiritual, communal — have independently arrived at versions of the same insight: that maintaining contact with yourself requires ongoing attention, not a one-time effort. That the drift happens slowly, and catching it requires a regular practice of honest self-inventory.

This is one of the things therapy does when it's working well. Not just addressing the acute crisis, but helping you maintain enough contact with your own inner life that you can recognize fragmentation while it's still early, before the seams have pulled too far apart.

EMDR, specifically, works at the level where fragmentation lives — in the body, in the nervous system, in the places where experience got stuck rather than processed. But the starting point is always the same: an honest accounting of what's actually present. Not what you wish were true, not what you're working toward, but what is.

That's where wholeness begins. Not with feeling better, but with knowing where you actually are.